Vizio’s Affordable 4K TVs Are Your Perfect Stepping Stone to Ultra HD
When they were introduced at CES, Vizio’s P-Series LCD sets did something most other LCD TVs at the show didn’t: They made buying a 4K set seem enticing and affordable. Starting at $1,000 for a 50-inch panel, the Ultra HD resolution (3,840 x 2,160) wasn’t the only thing that made the new TVs stand out.
The other perks included
full-array backlight panels with local dimming. That kind of setup is normally only found on the highest of the high-end LCD sets, but Vizio has been adding these once-expensive features to all its TVs in 2014.
The 70-inch P-Series set has 72 local-dimming zones, while the rest of the models have 64 zones. Each of the sets
also has a technology called Active Pixel Tuning that helps eliminate light bleed even further. The benefits of both features will be plain to see in terms of sharp contrast: Granular control over brightness combined with the balanced, bright lighting of a full-array LED should help the P-series approach the near-perfect picture quality that OLED delivers.
Hardware-wise, the P-series continues Vizio’s design trend of thinning out the bezel to bestow a wall-to-wall picture effect upon your eyeballs. The new sets have a
native refresh rate of 240Hz, as well as a simulated “Clear Action Rate” of 960Hz if you’re really into the soap-opera effect. To handle all that motion processing and 4K content, the P-series is driven by
six processing cores: A quad-core GPU and a dual-core CPU.
The 50-inch P-series set will sell for $1,000, the 55-incher will go for $1,400, the 60-incher is priced at $1,700, the 65-inch model will cost $2,200, and the 70-incher will sell for $2,500.
More good news: None of them are curved.